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Category: perspective

Framing the Sky

Framing the Sky

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Yesterday I looked up from page proofs long enough to notice how the hole in the sky left open when a large tree fell three years ago has grow a shaggy green border, enough to make a verdant frame for a patch of blue.

I stared at the “picture” inside that frame. It wasn’t a static one, of course, because high up in the canopy a faint breeze was stirring and white clouds bobbed across the blue, like so many duck targets at a state fair booth.  I watched long enough until I saw a hawk glide across the frame. At night I do the same thing with bats, sit in the gloaming and watch for them to dart through the air. They’re more visible when they cross our patch of sky.

It was a sad day when the great oak fell. But in the years since, I’ve grown fond of the space it left behind. Because of it, my eyes are more often drawn to the sky.

Above: a frame of a different sort. 

A Matter of Direction

A Matter of Direction

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This morning I enter the city from the east, the sun an orange disc behind me. Across a broad river and along a flat plain, the bus takes a route I don’t understand and scarcely notice.

For me, a car/Metro Orange Line/Metro Red Line commuter who enters and exits at least three vehicles before I walk into the office, this seems easy. Board a bus in one place, exit in another.

I think about approach and perspective, how the angle of light, the placement of shadows, can make such a difference.

I have arrived at the same destination from a different direction. And this has made an old place seem new again.

Castle in the Clouds

Castle in the Clouds

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I sit at a stoplight, one of several long ones I’ve already encountered on the way home. I’m running late and the light takes forever. I strum my fingers on the steering wheel, tap my feet, fiddle with the knobs of the radio and then fiddle with them some more. I look up, light’s still red. 

It’s then that I think that I have become Fairfax County. Its tempo is my tempo. Its impatience is my impatience.  I drive too close to the car in front of me as I listen too intently to public radio. I have come to believe that what I do every day is more important than it actually is.

What I need is a summer off. Humility Camp. In which people from the East Coast are sent to carefully chosen out-of-the-way burgs in the Heartland. Let us walk down empty sidewalks to the only store that sells the New York Times, only to find that there is no Times delivery today. The wireless in our rented two-bedroom will long since have fizzled. Our Kindle is out of charge.

There is nothing to do, then, but to lie back on the grass, look up at the sky and find a castle in the clouds.

Unendangered

Unendangered

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Of the three houses I lived in growing up, all had woods and fields nearby where I could ramble. These weren’t parks but undeveloped land, and about them hung an air of impermanence. The neighborhood I left to go to college was once known as Banana Hollow and had been known locally for its fine sledding hill. But the slope had long since fallen to the bulldozer.

I roamed the edges and bottomlands of this territory — just as I had the Ware farm which backed up to our previous house. That land, a plentiful pasture studded with the occasional giant oak, was home to a herd of grazing cattle. Some mornings I woke to the sound of their tramping and munching on the other side of our fence. But the Ware Farm was gone soon after we left that house, when I was a sophomore in high school.

All this is to say that when I hike through Folkstone Forest and the adjacent stream valley park, I am mindful of the gift, the certainty of this semi-natural land. Sure, in winter you might glimpse houses along its periphery, but plunge deep enough and all that’s visible is tree and fern and vine. It is stream valley land, prone to flooding and therefore protected.

I walk in an unendangered suburban wilderness. And I am grateful for that.

Right Back Where We Started From

Right Back Where We Started From

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Tom showed me a chart in the newspaper on New Year’s Eve, a chart that recorded the highs and lows, the improbable multiple dips and rises of the stock market in 2011. Funny thing was, it ended right where it began at the end of 2010.

There is cause for celebration in this. For the patient investor, obviously, who finds that — yes! — he still has a retirement fund. But for all of us who think we have fallen far when really we’re stuck in the same place.

I don’t like being stuck, stuck isn’t good. But it’s better than the alternative. So here’s a toast to all of us who, for whatever reason, find ourselves this year right where we were last year. We know what we have to do; now we just have to do it.

Post Irene

Post Irene

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The rain pounded and the winds roared but our trees remained upright and true. By mid Sunday morning, the sun was shining and the wind had blown in blue skies and puffy clouds. I took my camera for a walk and snapped photos of grasses blowing in the wind, late summer flowers nodding on their stalks and this one, of a pond near us.

It is an ordinary view made extraordinary by the quality of the air yesterday, pellucid and scrubbed clean. It was as if the true nature of the place was shining through.

I pass this pond several times a week, but now I will see, layered over its everyday clothes, this view — the pond decked out in its Sunday best.

Getting Out

Getting Out

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I hadn’t ridden Metro in 10 days and my first day back brought a delay. “This train is being off-loaded. Everyone out,” the conductor shouted. So we grabbed our bags and backpacks and joined the crush of other commuters on the platform.

It was dark and steamy. Passengers were not happy. It’s one thing to end your day with an off-load; starting it that way, when you’re morning crisp, is especially trying.

Then it dawned on me. Yes, it was already 80 at 7 a.m., but I was close enough to walk to the office. So I maneuvered my way down the platform and up the escalator to the outside world. The sidewalks were wide and the morning was bright. There was a faint breeze. I was out of the tunnel and could see far ahead.

Vacations, even short ones, show me the edges of things, reveal ways around obstacles. They help me see that I am not trapped.


Photo: PublicDomainPictures.net

What Else We Found

What Else We Found

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Yesterday I wrote about searching for morels. Today the story continues. When we looked for morels we found other treasures, too: shag bark hickory, sassafras root, wild oregano, a luna moth just emerging from its cocoon, a hog-nose viper that could curl itself in a circle and play dead, three box turtles and a huge wild turkey.

Part of it was that we put ourselves in a large wild woods where these plants and creatures grow and play; another part was that we were training ourselves to see.

When I walk I’m often lost in thought. I’m not looking for food; I’m certainly not looking for hog-nose vipers or box turtles. I wonder what is coiled in the leaves and slithering through the ferns in our own suburban woods. Maybe nothing as exotic as what we found in Brown County Indiana, but surprises, still.

(No box turtles were harmed in the taking of this picture. This little guy was admired and then sent on his way.)

Swing Time

Swing Time

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“How do you like to go up in a swing
Up in the air so blue.
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!”

Robert Louis Stevenson

I love the little poem in A Child’s Garden of Verses from which these lines are drawn. I recited it on stage at age six and read it often to our girls when they were young. Lines from it pop into my head whenever I go “up in a swing” myself.

Maybe it’s the residual kid in me but I still like to swing. There’s something about moving through the air, seeing the landscape from such a moveable perch, that is uniquely satisfying. Movement enhances vision, I suppose.

Of course, swinging doesn’t come as easily as it used to. It isn’t that I can’t pump my legs or move my arms. It’s that swinging gives me motion sickness. After a few minutes I have to hop off until the world stops spinning.

But the pleasure is worth the pain. There are few activitiess that provide as direct a link to childhood as this one. So I found a two-swing set in a neighborhood to our south. It’s tucked away in the woods (notice I’m not divulging the exact location), and it does not have a ridiculous sign like this one. There I can swing to my heart’s content and my head’s tolerance. Which means about, oh, five minutes or so.

Breathing Space

Breathing Space

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Oprah Magazine used to contain a double-page spread photograph of a windswept beach or mountain peak or other natural scene. It was called “Breathing Space.” I loved the photos and I loved the concept. The generous bestowal of two pages with no advertising, no text, just a picture. It really was a breathing space.
Maye I’m just missing it, but I don’t see “Breathing Space” in Oprah anymore. So today I offer my own breathing space. Pause here a minute to catch your breath.